Evolving collective control, cooperation and distributed cognition

Studies in collective robotics usually emphasise aspects like efficiency, robustness and flexibility of the system. These are all desirable features for a robotic system, which however do not come for free along with the distributed approach. Suitable design methodologies must be devised to obtain similar features in a collective robotic system, both for what concerns the robotic hardware and the control algorithms. In this chapter, we discuss the problem of synthesising distributed controllers for a group of robots by using evolutionary techniques